After breakfast, Aisha asks me if I’ll take a ride with her. I know where we’re going. She sits rigid as she drives us up Rimrock Road about a mile and then turns north, up toward the actual rim.
“Here goes everything,” she says.
The house she’s lived in all through high school is tall, thin, and built up into the rocks. It’s elevated a good twenty feet, and we have to climb some stone steps to get to the entrance. There are huge floor-to-ceiling windows on the first and second floors. We stand at the top of the steps and look up at it. The house looms over us, judgmental and stern. I feel really small standing there, and Aisha’s fear radiates off her skin as she tries to catch her breath.
Finally we march up to the bright-red front door.
Her mom answers. She’s a smallish, dark-skinned woman with Aisha’s cheekbones, and she wraps her arms around Aisha and squeezes with all her might. Aisha stands there, arms at her sides, and it’s like the air around us swirls with unsaid stuff.
“This is my friend, Carson,” Aisha says, pulling away, and her mother eyes me. “He’s been putting me up.”
Her mother gulps. “Thank you,” she whispers to me.
“Who is it?” a loud voice booms from above us.
Aisha’s mother jumps a bit. “No one.”
“Mommy!” It’s the youngest I’ve ever heard Aisha sound.
Her mom shakes her head. She puts her finger on Aisha’s lips, and she steps outside and closes the door behind her. “He’s not ready. You know how he is,” she says.
“Well, he needs to get over himself. Or else you’re not gonna be seeing me again.”
“You have to be patient with him. You know your daddy.”
“But —”
Her mother raises a finger, telling us to wait. She scurries inside and returns with a slip of paper, which she hands to Aisha. “I got a second cell. He doesn’t know about this number. You stay in touch with me, hear?”
“Mommy, you gotta —”
“He’s on a rampage,” she says. “Football stuff. This is not the right time.”
And her mother is closing the door on us.
Aisha screams, “Dad!”
Nothing.
“Dad! Get down here, Dad.” Her voice echoes in the canyon beneath the Rim. I hear it reverberate off the rock.
More nothing.
“I know you can hear me. You have to come down. You have to stop this. You don’t come down and that’s it. Hear me? … You’re gonna lose me. Forever. Dad?”
We stand in front of the door for a bit. Then we sit down on the steps, and Aisha puts her head in her hands, and she cries. I hug her and she cries some more, and then I cry too, because Aisha deserves to be celebrated by her dad. She doesn’t deserve to lose her father.
No one deserves that.
When the tears subside, we stand up, and Aisha stares at the door like she’s trying to memorize it, like she’s trying to memorialize the moment. I let her do her thing, and then she clasps my hand and we walk back down the stairs in silence.
When we get down to the bottom, she glances back at the house. We both look up, and there, standing against the floor-to-ceiling window on the second floor, is a huge, bald black man with his large arms crossed against his chest.
Aisha raises her hand to him.
He doesn’t move. I feel my heart crack.
Then he slowly uncrosses his arms, and he raises a hand back to her and places it against the glass window, and Aisha makes a noise I’ve never heard before, like a squeaky bleat, and she bounds up the stairs. Her dad disappears from the window. From a distance, I watch as the door opens, and he grabs her in his arms and lifts and hugs her, and he swings her around.
I can’t hear the words. Standing there, I realize that I may never get to know what the words are. I’m the sidekick, and this is her moment. They talk for a bit, and Aisha’s dad crosses his huge arms again and Aisha motions wildly with hers while she says whatever she says. Then she leans in and listens to him as he says whatever.
She rises onto her tiptoes to kiss his cheek, and he puts his face in his hands and his body begins to convulse. He turns away from her, shaking, and Aisha watches, her hands on her hips.
He turns back and gently kisses her on the cheek, then he hides his face again and walks inside. Aisha is left standing alone, in front of the red door.
Just as I’m deciding to go to her, she comes walking down the stairs. I see her eyes are wet and glassy. I give her a big hug, and then we get in the car and drive off.
“Well, I suppose it’s better to know” is all she says.
Aisha takes a grief nap when we get back, and I tell my mom what happened. She listens with her hands holding her head like a vice, like she’s trying to keep her skull from exploding.
“Where will Aisha stay when we go back to New York?” my mother asks.
I shake my head. I can’t even think about that. If we go back, does that mean Dad is dead? Could he come with us? Too many variables, too many things I don’t want to imagine.
“Is she done with high school?”
“Just graduated. Was going to Rocky Mountain College here, but her dad withdrew her.”
“Maybe I can chat with her about her options,” she says, and I stand up and kiss my mom on the cheek.
“Thank you,” I say.
Dad and Turk return after going to two AA meetings back-to-back, and Dad looks glassy-eyed and wasted. I notice his legs as he sits on the couch. They are so skinny. It makes me think of my grandfather, and how thin and frail he probably was at the end of his life.
“I don’t think this is going to work for me,” he says.
“You don’t need to think,” Turk tells him. He’s sitting on the other couch. I’m in the doorway, just listening. “Not right now. Just go in with an open mind and listen.”
“It won’t work. Not if we get to the point where I have to pray.”
“God wants you to be quiet.”
Dad squeezes his eyes shut. “Did you just tell me to shut up? Did you just tell me God wants me to shut up?”
“No,” Turk says. “Be quiet. There’s a difference.”
That night we have dinner as a family. Mom grills chicken breasts and Turk helps out in the kitchen, boiling corn on the cob and slicing tomatoes for everyone.
Mom sits next to Dad at the table and cuts up his food for him. The look in his eyes as he watches her care for him tells me he still loves her completely. And when I see how tender she is as she tucks a napkin into the lapel of his shirt, I see that she loves him too.
“Delicious,” my dad says.
“Thanks,” says my mother. “I’m glad you like it.”
“So when we head back to New York, where are Aisha and Dad going to stay?” I say, half kidding and half not kidding at all. I expect my mom to stare daggers at me for saying this, because obviously we don’t have the room. Unless Aisha sleeps with me and Dad sleeps with her…. Well, come to think of it.
“We’ll see,” Mom says.
“For the record,” I note, “that’s not a no.”
“Let’s be here now,” she says, and I don’t snort but I want to.
I savor the tart of the tomato against the roof of my mouth. “Can we get a dog when we go back to New York?”
“I would say that’s down the list of priorities quite a ways,” she says.
“Ours is a family that could use a dog. That would help.”
As Dad talks a bit about the drunks at the meeting and the things they said, and Turk keeps shaking his head and saying, “Anonymity, Matthew, anonymity,” I think about how amazing it is that we’re having dinner together as a family. Before Aisha arrived, Dad ate in his room, and Mom and I were like two ships passing in the night. Even after, we were this weird, fractured household. How did this happen?